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Polysynthetic languages | ||
Tags: Agglutinative languages | Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3828 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 4 24 February 2014 at 11:06pm | IP Logged |
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Hi all!
Just a naive curiosity: I know that a good number of people in this forum likes to study agglutinative languages; the most extreme type of language anyway seems to be the polysyntethic type. Just a couple of questions: - did someone of you manage to speak with confidence a polysynthetic language? which one? There are some of them that are not nearly impossible? :) - which one is the most widely spoken/understood? - I'm not sure I understood the difference between a polysynthetic and a highly agglutinative language. Both seem to produce amazingly long words that can mean an entire sentence in English. Thank you very much and sorry for the very technical question :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4559 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 2 of 4 25 February 2014 at 3:10am | IP Logged |
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My understanding is that polysynthetic languages form a subdivision of agglutinative languages, and that native American languages are the best example of this type, so I would assume Navajo, Inuit, Quechua, Aymara, etc. are the most widely spoken.
As a native IE speaker I have always found the concept of agglutination even more alien than tones or elaborate case declensions. That's one reason why I have never studied Turkish or any of the FU languages, because in Turkish, for example, a single word may have so many agglutinative suffixes it may actually be the length of an entire sentence. However, recently I found out I had already studied an agglutinative language to fluency--Armenian. I didn't even know that Armenian has the distinction of being the only agglutinative IE language. There may be possibly another one, but I'm not aware of which one it is. The agglutination of Eastern Armenian is not as complex as that of Turkish, but a phrase like "from the houses", or "in the books", beginning with the noun, is followed by 2 agglutinative suffixes, the first denoting the plural, and the second denoting the genitive or prepositional case. In the 2 examples I have chosen, the noun actually drops its lone vowel, therefore becoming a consonant cluster followed by 2 agglutinative suffixes. To be precise, sometimes the second suffix is written separately. I can't answer as to how Armenian acquired its agglutination. Some linguists point to its possible Urartian substratum as the reason, therefore sharing similarities with Georgian, another agglutinoid. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dragon27 Diglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 4022 days ago 41 posts - 71 votes Speaks: Russian*, English | Message 3 of 4 25 February 2014 at 5:23am | IP Logged |
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In polysynthetic languages "words" are composed of many morphemes (each morpheme have different meaning, like some object, action, tense, negation, etc). It's like one sentence. Usually Native American languages (and Inuit languages) are of that kind.
In agglutinative ones you connect a lot of affixes to one root (each affix has the meaning like "future", "negative", "plural"). Affixes are fixed (i.e. they don't change their form depending on other affixes, but they may be different for each word). Both polysynthetic and agglutinative languages are synthetic languages, but they are not the same (and one group is not a subdivision of the other). On the other side, a language may not be a pure agglutinative, and contain features of multiple typologies. Navajo is polysynthetic, but it is also agglutinating. Quechua is agglutinative (and is very regular). Edited by Dragon27 on 25 February 2014 at 8:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3813 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 4 of 4 26 February 2014 at 12:04am | IP Logged |
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Navajo is said to be a language where every verb is irregular, but I doubted this to some degree, I took notice of a
book by Robert Young where he claims it is more regular than most people believe. The Northwestern Caucasian languages are also polysynthetic to some degree. The difficulty with polysynthetic languages to me is not that they are always irregular, but that one has to leave far less to context. Edited by Stolan on 26 February 2014 at 12:06am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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